Reports of the death of feminism have often been grossly exaggerated, to borrow loosely from Mark Twain’s remark on being the subject of a death hoax.
Maybe this time it is not an exaggeration, at least, not in some parts of the world. The BBC broadcast a very disconcerting radio report recently about young women aged 15-24 in Sweden opting to be “soft girls,” ie, to stop work, stay home and adopt a more feminine, career-less, stress-free way of life while their male partners remain the breadwinners.
Yes, the soft-girl lifestyle has been trending on social media globally since the late 2010s, but that’s been low-level. And Trump’s trad wives have been advocating the return to a nation of housewives – but that is mainly middle America, not Sweden! Scandinavia in general, and Sweden in particular, has a global reputation for gender equality and social justice. And yet the trend is deepening, with 14 per cent of seven-year old Swedish girls also claiming to be soft girls.
Encouragingly though, it has provoked a lively public debate there. Why are young women ready to jeopardise the hard-won gains of at least two generations of women who have had to fight to achieve the right to work, to economic independence, to have the lowest gender pay gap in Europe (ten per cent), parental leave that is 70 per cent supported by the state and generously subsidised child care? In Sweden, workers are entitled to six weeks’ annual leave and less than one per cent of people work more than 50 hours a week.
But Sweden’s working mothers are among the highest proportion in Europe and soft girls do not want to be subject to those strains, because they see working women still do most of the housework and child care. They do not want to emulate them – but some might consider that a reason for more feminist activism, not less.
It would seem that affluence and high levels of equality are slightly at odds with feminism, which always exists where disadvantage exists. In countries such as Sweden, where the status of women has risen and they feel free and unthreatened by traditional male attitudes, young women might think the battle has been won and they no longer need to be radically minded.
Feminists are quite right that young, inexperienced soft girls who are in thrall to social media, which is more focused on feel-good and body beautiful than career progression, understand nothing about the dangers of turning the clock back to a world in which women depend on men for their freedom and autonomy. By giving up financial control of their lives women will surrender every important right that ensues. They do not realise, says feminist activist and leading gender academic, UWI Professor Emerita Rhoda Reddock, that this shift in women’s attitude is happening without any change in the patriarchal power men still possess: “Masculinity endows privilege on men, and that has not changed.”
It means that without female resistance, male authority will only intensify, and like so many advances we take for granted, everything women have achieved
